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News
Featured Books
    All Featured Books
    Book of the Month Series
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Campaigns
    Fossil Stories
    Garden Stories
    Monsters Are Real
    Page Frights
    Her Natural History
    Earth Optimism 2020
Tech Blog
Visit BHL
  • Home
  • News
  • Featured Books
    • All Featured Books
    • Book of the Month Series
  • User Stories
  • Campaigns
    • Fossil Stories
    • Garden Stories
    • Monsters Are Real
    • Page Frights
    • Her Natural History
    • Earth Optimism 2020
  • Tech Blog
  • Visit BHL
Biodiversity Heritage Library - Program news and collection highlights from BHL

All posts by Bianca Crowley

BHL News, Blog Reel, Featured Books

Ukrainian Українська Collection

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Through ongoing collaborative collection building and digitization, the United States Department of Agriculture’s National Agricultural Library (NAL) is partnering with the Biodiversity Heritage Library to support biodiversity and scientific research in Ukraine with the release of the Ukrainian Українська Collection. BHL and NAL stand with the people of Ukraine and echo the support of its consortium partner institutions in their condemnation of the Russian Federation’s invasion.

The threat to Ukraine’s cultural heritage materials remains substantial during the wartime humanitarian crisis. Many libraries and cultural heritage institutions throughout Ukraine have been severely damaged or destroyed, resulting in the permanent loss of culturally and scientifically significant content. Through the digitization of historic materials related to biodiversity research in Ukraine, this project will help support Ukraine’s scientific community by providing access to these important resources.

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April 4, 2023byClayton Ruminski and Bianca Crowley
BHL News, Blog Reel

New Collection Development Policy

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The BHL Collections Committee has completed a comprehensive review and revision of BHL’s collection development policy. The new policy is written to provide recommendations and serve the collection management needs of BHL Partners. As a key objective of BHL’s Strategic Plan 2020-2025, the new policy is a significant revision to the original policy written in 2010. In learning together as a collaborative community of practice since then, our understanding of BHL collection management has been expanded and refined to:

  • clarify collection management priorities;
  • articulate our responsibility to pursue more diverse perspectives;
  • outline BHL Partner expectations;
  • better define our scope;
  • describe BHL-specific curation best practices; and
  • provide transparency by posting the complete policy via BHL’s About Site.

Going forward, the collection development policy will be reviewed on a yearly basis for minor updates.

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November 17, 2022byBianca Crowley
BHL News, Blog Reel

Acknowledging Harm, Rethinking Collections

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The Biodiversity Heritage Library has released an Acknowledgment of Harmful Content to recognize deep prejudices within some of the pages of its collection. As a digital library of natural science publications and archival materials, BHL is a free and open access online resource that primarily reflects the print collections of its contributors. Some of the content in BHL is harmful because it reflects ableist, classist, colonialist, eurocentrist, racist, sexist, xenophobic, and other biased views, especially in descriptions of peoples, lands, and species. The long and, at times, painful history of the scientific record has privileged hegemonic perspectives with the right to print while stifling the voices of the powerless.

BHL joins recent global outcries against racial and environmental injustice. We are assessing our role as a digital library and the responsibility we have to question our neutrality and address harm without reducing access. We are deeply concerned about the continuing crisis of global species loss and the inequitable divisions within our own species. Reflecting on ourselves, we see an organization grappling with inclusion and the acute consequences that these harmful views have on the world and its people today.

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October 13, 2021byBianca Crowley
BHL News, Blog Reel

BHL Records Now Available in WorldCat

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BHL is pleased to announce that it has added its bibliographic records to OCLC’s WorldCat® database, “the world’s largest network of library content and services.” You can now find BHL e-books via https://www.worldcat.org/. With thousands of libraries worldwide participating in OCLC, contributing our records to this “global library cooperative” allows us to extend the discoverability and access of BHL e-books through its variety of tools and services.

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March 31, 2020byBianca Crowley
BHL News, Blog Reel

Q: How many BHL’s can you fit into a single meeting?

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Back in June I attended the 50th Annual Meeting of The Council on Botanical and Horticultural Libraries (CBHL) which was also host to the 25th anniversary meeting of the European Botanical and Horticultural Libraries Group (EBHL) as well as the 22nd annual meeting of Linnaeus Link partners. The theme of the meeting was “Botanical and Horticultural Libraries in the Modern Era: Training and Vision for the Future” and it encouraged its attendees to “[discuss] how technology has united us and what the future holds in store for us as we enter the new millennium.” The joint meeting was held between the New York Botanical Garden and the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. Presentations centered around new or revamped digitization projects, implementing electronic access to materials as well as initiatives to better integrate library and archival materials into research discovery systems.

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August 30, 2018byBianca Crowley
BHL News, Blog Reel

DPLA Reharvest of BHL Data

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On April 11, 2017 the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) reharvested all BHL data for ingest into its portal at https://dp.la/. While BHL has served as a content hub for DPLA since its launch in 2013, our data has not been updated in their portal since that launch, primarily due to the absence of a workflow on DPLA’s end for automatically harvesting new data. Since 2013, the number of BHL records in our portal has increased significantly and changes and corrections to pre-2013 records were not reflected in the DPLA portal.

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May 18, 2017byTrish Rose-Sandler and Bianca Crowley
BHL News, Blog Reel

Internet Archive Library Leaders Forum 2016

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At the end of October I attended the Internet Archive Library Leaders Forum 2016. This was the 3rd time I’ve attended this meeting since 2009 and was by far the best one yet! The Forum coincided with IA’s 20th anniversary so there was a big push from IA to showcase their latest and greatest to celebrate their platinum year.     The most successful aspect of the Forum was meeting with Internet Archive colleagues and partners face to face, many of which share similar digitization workflow and collection management challenges to BHL.
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December 21, 2016byBianca Crowley
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The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) is the world’s largest open access digital library for biodiversity literature and archives. Headquartered at the Smithsonian Libraries and Archives in Washington, D.C., BHL operates as a worldwide consortium of natural history, botanical, research, and national libraries working together to digitize the natural history literature held in their collections and make it freely available for open access as part of a global “biodiversity community.”

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